Tuesday, September 15, 2015

You Can't Spell "Conspiracy" Without "Con," "Piracy," "Ira," or "Racy." Think About It.

"FAT BEE" is a modular bicycle made by Altinsoy Manufaktur. The design was first visualized in a sketch which later developed into a technichal drawing that provided the basis for the prototype. This bike is equipped with a Rohloff-Speed-Hub 500/14 as gearbox and is driven by a Gates Carbon Drive belt. The headset has a King bearing and a Rock Shoxs Bluto suspension. The weight, form and size of the frame which is made out of a special alloy is modifiable at any time. It can be converted to full suspension in just a few steps. So this bicycle can adjust to the needs of its user anytime.

At first I couldn't remember the name of the company that sells this bike (I've seen a lot of dumb crap during my long career as a semi-professional bike blogger after all), so I plugged the phrase "cheese grater bike" into a popular search engine and that was all it took.

"I've been here 12 years and it's disgusting," said Janine Whiteson, mother of a fifth grader at the school. "We have 650 kids, and most of them are really little. They could knock into the bikes or fall and hurt themselves. Who knows what kind of people will come in. It's disgraceful."

I agree, it is disgusting that you've been there 12 years. Ever think there might be a connection? And yeah, I'm sure little Timmy's going to get ensnared by a docked Citi Bike and they're going to have to call the fire department to free him with the Jaws of Life. As for the thing about "what kind of people will come in," we all know what that means: CHILD MOLESTERS! Come on, vans are sooo last century--everybody knows that pedophiles love bike share now:

Actually that's motion picture acting person Leonardo DiCaprio, but I plugged "citi bike child molester" into a popular search engine and that's the first thing that popped up.

Go figure.

In any case, you'll be pleased to know the parents of PS 290 aren't taking this lying down, and that a sternly-worded letter is forthcoming:"I didn't know about it until I saw the truck there," said Ivy Rosen, who has a second grader at the school. "Out of all the blocks to put it on ... I'm sending in a letter."

In fact, I recently obtained a draft of this letter when I snuck into the PS 290 parent association meeting:

Dear Department of Transportation,By placing a rack of brightly-colored bicycles on the same street as a school you are endangering the welfare of our children. Did you know that falling over parked bicycles injures two and a half children nationally each decade? And what if the children are not able to see the bikes due to color blindness, which disproportionately affects caucasian boys? As a school with a student body that is nearly 75% white this is clearly a case of racial discrimination. Also, who knows what kind of people will come in to use the bike? (Hint: it's child molesters.)Please remove these bicycles and place them in front of a less privileged school immediately.Sincerely,Ivy Rosen

I plan to follow up with a letter of my own asking that they move the station to my child's school right away.

Frangos and his team examined the kinds of injuries that turned up in their ER. The results - obtained by NY1 - found that patients who had been wearing helmets when the accidents occurred were 72 percent less likely to sustain traumatic brain injury than those who didn't protect their heads. And those who wore helmets usually practiced safer cycling behavior."Helmeted bicyclists were less likely to have alcohol in their system. Helmeted cyclists were more likely to be using a bike lane or a bike path. Additionally, helmeted bicyclists were less likely to lose consciousness in the event of a crash," says Dr. Frangos.

Okay. So bike lanes and being sober keep cyclists safer. No shit.

Frangos says with new bike lanes and Citi-Bike stations making the city increasingly bike-friendly and more cyclists on the streets there should be a re-evaluation of whether a tough helmet law is needed and should be added to Mayor Bill de Blasio's "Vision Zero" plan to end traffic deaths."Certainly we here at Bellevue are very supportive of that initiative. I would say that if the intent of 'Vision Zero' is to protect everybody, even a single injury, critical injury or death, is one too many. Certainly we need to find a way to educate bicyclists more as to the protective effect of helmets and encourage bicyclists more to don them," says Dr. Frangos.

I wanted to learn more about Dr. Frangos's study, so I consulted the same popular search engine into which I typed "cheese grater bike" and "citi bike child molester," and I found the following abstract:

From this, they conclude there should be a "re-assessment of helmet laws:"

Despite substantial road safety measures in NYC, the protective impact of simple bicycle helmets in the event of a crash remains significant. A re-assessment of helmet laws for urban bicyclists is advisable to most effectively translate Vision Zero from a political action plan to public safety reality.

Now, I wanted to read the entire study, but the publisher wanted $31.50 for just 24 hours access. This seemed unreasonable to me, and it appears I'm not alone:

Criticism and controversiesIn recent years the subscription rates charged by the company for its journals have been criticised; some very large journals (those with more than 5000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as $14,000, far above average,[15] and many British universities pay more than a million pounds to Elsevier annually.[16] The company has been criticised not only by advocates of a switch to the open-access publication model, but also by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them to afford current journal prices. For example, a resolution by Stanford University's senate singled out Elsevier's journals as among those which might be "disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value" and which librarians should consider dropping, and encouraged its faculty "not to contribute articles or editorial or review efforts to publishers and journals that engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing".[17] Similar guidelines and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been passed by the University of California, Harvard University and Duke University.[18] The elevated pricing of field journals in economics, most of which are published by Elsevier, was one of the motivations that moved the American Economic Association to launch the American Economic Journal in 2009.[19]

This study reveals some important differences between helme(n)ted and non-helme(n)ted riders:

In particular, significantly more helme(n)tless cyclists are:

1) Salmoning
2) Running lights
3) Drunk

Now, here are helme(n)ted and non-helme(n)ted riders across the Injury Severity Scale, and as you can see the outcomes are pretty similar:

In fact, given that non-helme(n)ted riders are more likely to be salmoning, running lights, or drunk, it certainly looks like the helme(n)ts themselves are almost irrelevant--which is in fact the conclusion of the study:

It certainly makes sense to me that, by and large, the sort of cyclists who wear helme(n)ts are more likely to ride safely. However, as the study shows, this has little to do with the helme(n)t itself, which is really more of a signifier--basically a big foam "safety kippah." Otherwise, as far as the stuff you can control, basically you shouldn't salmon, run lights, or ride drunk.

Duh.

I wonder to what degree drunken salmoning and light-running were factors in the more recent study as well, and if I've ever got $31.50 burning a hole in my jersey pocket maybe I'll check it out.

(BBC calls a maiming that is "still being investigated" an "accident.")

You may recall the cabbie's chilling words:Mr Himon said: "I am praying for her and her family. But it is not my fault. It is just an accident."This is what cab drivers have to deal with every day."It could have happened to any of us."Mr Himon, who launched the fund for Ms Green with the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, claimed the cyclist had pounded on his car and yelled at him.

Wow.

Dr Spiros Frangos, a senior trauma surgeon at the hospital, said replanting her left leg had not been an option given its condition.He said she was "likely" to regain the use of her right leg, which had "sustained multiple deep lacerations".

"This would not have happened if the messenger had been wearing a helmet," he added.

“Doping is not the reason why Lance Armstrong won but it did shape a culture at the time, and it certainly shaped him, and I wanted to understand — on a personal level, on a cellular level — what that experience is like.”

Sounds intense. I understand the actor who played Levi Leipheimer spent a lot of time shopping at the Gap, watching JAG, and listening to Third Eye Blind for similar reasons.

Their stats are fairly hokey though. The model they base the findings on controlled for: "mecha- nism of injury, alcohol use, electronic device use, commercial status, and age", but no measure of speed, which one thinks might be somewhat important.

I'm just going to fill the top 10 with this.. but the other choice finding was:

"This model also shows that cyclists who struck other bicyclists or pedestrians were more likely to sustain TBI than those injured in collisions with motor vehicles, although this did not reach statistical significance (AOR 2.32, CI 0.90–5.96)."

Thank you for that! Here's my question now: out of the 700 (or 699) riders in the study, it appears the no-helme(n)t/helme(n)t split was roughly 60/40. I have a difficult time believing that 40% of NYC cyclists wear helme(n)ts. I imagine it's much less. If so, wouldn't this indicate you're MORE likely to wind up in a Level 1 trauma center if you're wearing a helme(n)t?

Wildcat - yes, that's a really interesting point. If your hunch is right then it would be good evidence. My only concern is that as a semi professional bike blogger with 17 children you're not always out and about at the time these accidents happen — commuting was associated with increased risk vs leisure use also. Perhaps someone could run a study to collect the frequency of helment wearing in the vicinity of the accidents in question from CCTV images ... it would make a nice control group.

The other argument I've heard the anti-helmet people make is that helmets don't protect riders because cyclists wearing helmets are more likely to take risks, relying on the helmet to save them. So in a sense it's nice to hear the argument being made that cyclists wearing helmets are less likely to take risks. Maybe the two effects cancel out?Anyway, there's a way to find out the truth, by looking at case-control studies. If cyclists wearing helmets took more (or fewer) risks, you would expect them to have more (or fewer) injuries to parts of the body other than the head. And those studies just don't support this. There doesn't seem to be a major benefit or harm to other parts of the body from wearing a helmet. All they do is protect heads. Which they do pretty well.

"out of the 700 (or 699) riders in the study, it appears the no-helme(n)t/helme(n)t split was roughly 60/40. I have a difficult time believing that 40% of NYC cyclists wear helme(n)ts."

But the study wasn't built to model the cycling community in NYC; it's a study of people going to the hospital. I took that (combined with the number of injuries to the extremities) to mean that a lot of Freds are going to the hospital. They disproportionately wear helmets and (if my Facebook feed is any indication) accidents with clipless pedals do way more damage to joints and ligaments as the crashing bike yanks the legs all over the place. My interpretation of the data is that active safety measures (e.g. not salmoning drunk) is the best way to prevent injury and that helmets are only a signifier of this behavior. Which is like saying that making everyone wear running shoes is the solution to the obesity epidemic because more people who wear running shoes workout.

All I'm sure of at this point is telling governments they should pass anti-cycling legislation instead of making street improvements is probably a reliable source of grant money and a good way to get your name in medical journals.

Studies that can't be controlled or reporduced are basically worthless. You can extrapolate any result you want.

In a study of riders on fixed-gear bikes that had cut-down flat bars were more likely to get run into by cabs. Therefore, anybody with a hipster mustache and/or full beardway is much more likely to get hit by a cab. Unless they have a man-purse with cupcakes in it. There was a slight variation noted in subjects wearing skinny jeans versus jorts.

Hmm. Food delivery guys? The delivery guys I've seen obey the majority of traffic laws. While they salmon like mf-ers, they don't drink on the job and always stop at red lights, it's an opportunity to ash their ubiquitous cigarettes. whipsaw_machine, I don't see what effect helmets have on MRI costs. Unlike helmets, MRIs aren't for the head only so a helmet isn't a determining factor for whether a patient will be needing an MRI. Helmets are not magic; they don't protect anything below your nose.

i dont know how it goes up there day to day, but down here in ye old sunshine wang state, i'd say you could more ore less group cyclists into 3 or so buckets:

1) the serious freders and fredericas. almost all the ones i see are helmutted.

2) a more casual rider, but clearly still an actual "cyclist" - maybe just doing it for the exercise per doctors orders, but still riding a decent bike and probably can ride reasonably well and knows most of the laws of the road pertaining to bikes. I'd also include various hipsters riding to class or to the coffee shop or because its green etc...in this group. i'd say this is like 70/30 helmuts to non helmuts.

3) people who are sort of forced into cycling - large swaths of poor folks, homeless etc... they are technically on a bike, but i'd say are far from having any interest in it other than its quicker than walking.

i dont have any stats, but i'm guessing just based on the cycling habits of those 3 groups, that most of the accidents involve group 3 because they are constantly making up their own rules of the road on the bike, often drunk, and almost never in a helmut.

i guess my point here is that i'd assume a study like the hospital one probably just lumps anyone on a bike into "cyclist" which i dont think is an entirely accurate picture.

Mark Twain said there are 3 kinds of liars - liars, damn liars and statisticians.

Re the Citibike Station at the UES School-

There are the NIMBY People, and then there are the CAVE People (Citizens Against Virtually Everything). If the school has no space for a playground or gym, it is time to close down that school, relocate it to somewhere that will allow it to have all appropriate facilities, and let the board of education or city sell that property for re-development. With a Citibike station so close, the property will fetch more money!

The helmet studies I've seen all seem to suffer from the lack of a rigorous "base rate" -- that is, the rate of helmet wearing among the overall cycling population. In Los Angeles, where I live, there are cycle counts annually, but they go on for a week only and target small parts of the city.

More generally, we hardly know anything about cyclists' demographics: how many, their ethnicity, rate of helmet wearing, injury rate, and so on. It's a big problem in doing effective public health studies.

Its focus is really quite narrow: ""The objective of this study was to examine whether bicycle helmets offer a protective advantage against traumatic brain injury (TBI) within a contemporary dense urban setting with a commitment to road safety."

"MethodsA prospective observational study of injured bicyclists presenting to a Level I trauma centre was performed. All bicyclists arriving within 24 h of injury were included.

Riding behaviours and mechanisms of injuryBicyclists’ riding behaviours and mechanisms of injury are detailed in Table 2. Most bicyclists reported riding for leisure at the time of injury. Working bicyclists were more likely to be helmeted (51.8%), while bicyclists riding for leisure were less likely (29.9%). Thirty-three bicyclists were riding as part of the NYC bicycle share program (also known as ‘Citibike’) at the time of injury, representing 8.5% of study patients from the launch of the program (May 27, 2013) onward; of these, 18.2% were wearing helmets at the time of injury.

Most bicycle-related injuries occurred in collisions with motor vehicles. Helmeted bicyclists were more likely to be riding in a bicycle lane or vehicle-protected bicycle path (56.6% [95% CI, 50.2–62.8] vs. 32.1% [95% CI, 27.3–37.2]) at the time of injury. Most patients (87.3%) self-reported that they were travelling at 15 mph or less, and there were no significant differences in riding speed between the groups."

So despite a large majority of riders in bike lanes, most injuries are caused by collisions with motor vehicles. This quite striking data point is entirely absent from the discussion in this paper.

That school situation really, really does not sound like your typical "not on my block!" citibike station objection.

Rather, it sounds like the school uniquely has the power from the city to turn a block of the street into a playground during certain hours, and that the citibike station in question is inside the perimeter of the resulting playground.

Sorry folks, but allowing random adults onto a primary school playground during its hours of operation is just not something this country has seen fit to permit since before today's school administrators were themselves in primary school.

And no, barricading it off during those hours probably won't work either - someone whose time limit is about to run out will insist on barging in and returning one anyway, likely setting up a conflict with school security.

Perhaps, for once the objectors are right, and the station belongs around the corner or a street over.

I see your point WCRM. Now that you have me thinking about delivery guy life, i wonder how many are out there in NYC; loads of course there are so many delivery places here that if each only had one guy, it'd be thousands of guys. But I wonder if they have a large stable, or if each place has, like, 3 guys working a brutal number of days and hours (probably the latter, because everything is always awful). I wish someone would make a video about this instead of bearded bros mashing.

Yet they allow automobile parking on that street, according to both DOT and Streetview.

Citi Bike stations can be taken offline at certain times, just like streets can have "no parking" rules at certain times. Citi Bike stations also don't exist in vacuum. If one's closed you move on to next one.

@BSNYC I don't know about the grant money; but I agree that it's a lot easier for politicians to call for bike helme(n)t laws than for bike infrastructure, let alone enforcing the traffic laws versus motorists.

My dog wishes to point out that "The Safety Dance" was recorded by the Canadian group Men Without Hats.

Safety.... Without Hats ... Canadians.

He rests his case.

In my years of commuting, I have "needed" a helmet three times. Once, hitting a plastic water bottle and then the curb at moderate speed, achieving a cut lip and bruised ego. My helmet sustained a slight skid mark. The other two times were bumping into parked truck mirrors at very low speed before coffee. Not sure the helmet made any difference with the truck mirrors.

On the other hand, I have been doored in a bike lane while wearing nothing more than a cotton BSNYC cap. A helmet would have done nothing to prevent the bruise on my face from the door, which I was assured made me look very tough.

As for why I was wearing nothing more than a cotton BSNYC cap .... I lost a bet. Thank goodness the weather wasn't chilly.

Just alerting everyone to the reality of p-hacking, as I have nothing to contribute to the helmnent debate, since I ALWAYS wear one. Just falling over while stationary generates sufficient force to kill you if you hit your head. Anyhow, researchers, statisticians, et al. kinda, sorta, sometimes manipulate data to get their stuff published, and it happens ALL THE TIME! (Where's Ted K. when you need him?)

I'm a borderline Fred and wear a helmet 98% of the time but I really object to anyone telling me I have to wear one. If they really gave a shit about our safety they would ban the use of cell phones in vehicles and enforce it. Helmet laws are once again blaming the victim, focusing on what we need to do to protect ourselves when there is no real protection on a bike when a car or truck smashes into you. Funding some bike lanes would help but most politicians would rather embrace "solutions" that they don't have to pay for.

Why is it that the only fat bikes I see are the ones for sale? Who is buying these damn things and where are they riding them? Hell fixies are dead and I see more of those than I do fat bikes.

"Police said the crash was still being investigated and the cyclist involved had not been charged." THE CYCLIST INVOLVED HAD NOT BEEN CHARGED. And the cab driver, who so lost control of his vehicle that it left the street, nada, nothing, zippo.

janinedm: Yes, clipless pedals! How about breaking your foot in a zero-speed/lack-of-sleep crash, falling over and having the pavement want to unclip your shoe in the wrong direction. I hate when that happens.

A few months ago I'm sitting in an ER with a staph infection of the elbow from a mostly healed but formerly significant road rash a full three weeks after the slide and the doctor asks me if I had a helmet on. I'm an asshole, so you can imagine how that went. Just give me the fucking drugs lady! And yes, I had the foam hat on.

This points out the problem with experiential data. It is uncontrolled, and thus ridiculously easy to manipulate. The gold standard is the double-blind study, which, if properly designed goes a long way towards eliminating observer bias.

Therefore, I call upon your readership to volunteer to be hit by cars under controlled circumstances, half while helmeted and half while helmetless. We will then compare rates of paraplegia and traumatic brain injury.

I remember this same healment discussion with motorcycles many years ago. Plus the general motocycle hate, such as riding two abreast, salmoning, "filtering", can't see them, rude, obnoxious, scruffy looking, on and on. Then all of a sudden it got hip to ride a Harley or a Goldwing just because and all the complaining stopped. And the obesity rate "hockey sticked" Random chance? I don't think so. Now where is my grant money!

Citi Bike blue is the worst color ever. It's destroying our city. Who knows what plagues will befall us now that it is moving out in the burbs. As a bulwark against this onslaught, I and my slavish minions vow to become irrationally angry and start imagining all sorts of horrible and completely illogical scenarios whenever we see it.

How does the actor know doping wasn't the reason what's-his-name won? I don't even believe there's any data showing that an undoped what's-his-name is any faster than I am. And I don't care about going fast.

WCRM et al.,Public perception is everything. Most commonly overheard refrains: Bikes are a menace and a societal scurvy! Get a car!

It is an uphill battle to say the least. Just yesterday I witnessed a cyclist on a full suspension dix breaks springy dealio riding on the sidewalk. Who cares, he's just a kid you say? well, he swerves around a woman with a small dog, and clips a blind woman headed in the other direction. He snaps her walking cane, the white one with the red bit at the end. He sorts himself out, and starts off without so much as a howdy-do. So the terrified blind woman is there, trying to use her broken cane and screaming and the other woman starts berating the youth, who said he was sorry but he didn't think it was worth saying again jeez, whatever (insert youth attitude). Now the light is green and this scene fades into the mirror but dude, it makes us cyclists look like dodgy cunts when this shit happens in a downtown area already full of hate.

Put your helmet on and hit yourself in the head with a hammer. Now try it without the helmet. Let me know the results. Of fucking course the helmet offers some protection all other things being equal. Should it be a law, fuck no.

I get that you oppose the idea of a law or ordinance requiring helmets be worn by cyclists. I get that you think such efforts distract attention from some of the causes of injury for cyclists (i.e. motorists). I agree on both fronts. I live in one of the few states where even motorcyclists aren’t required by law to wear a helmet.

But in writing about the problem the way you do, you seem to be taking the stance that people shouldn’t wear helmets at all. That may not be your intent, but that’s the way it reads sometimes and if that’s the case, I think it’s irresponsible. Helmets don’t guarantee safety, but if its a choice between your head hitting the pavement, and your (properly fitted and worn) helmeted head hitting the pavement, I think most people are going to be better off with the helmeted head.

If you don’t think it should be a law, neither do I, but let it be an informed choice and stop giving people a hard time about it.

I was convinced many years ago that helmets are mostly irrelevant to bike safety when i read that the safest country in the world, the Netherlands, had the lowest helmet use; and the second safest country Denmark also had very low helmet use. So yes, the counter argument was that the U.S.A. is not the Netherlands. Fair enough. But now after more than 7 years and more than 50 million rides, and more than 100 million miles (still sort of a small sample size), it turns out that there has never been a U.S.A fatality on a Bike Share Bike. In the toughest urban areas of the U.S.A., with novice bicyclists, with a lower use of helmets, and despite the dire predictions of the "experts", not one fatality. ZERO. And very low injury rates. And still the helmet worshippers persist, especially in regards to Bike Share Bikes. If the fatality rate for Bike Share Bikes is as low or lower than knitting, what is their Fucking problem? Why not helmets for driving, walking, even bus riding which all have fatality rates higher than Zero? So basically: Fuck Them.

I require that my wife wears a helmet when she accompanies me on jaunts around town (nyc) because the streets are fucking dangerous mainly due to horrible aggressive drivers. If one of us gets hit by one of them, we are very likely to get pretty fucked up even with the helmet. After all two tons of moving metal can do bad things (I read this in a study somewhere). So if you really want to make a dent in the injury statistics as per vision zero, hands down the most effective way to do this would be to have stricter laws against dangerous driving and vigilantly enforce those laws. Our mayor seems to be taking a different approach, which is to ticket cyclists at every opportunity and if they get a helmet law there will be many more opportunities for that. Will that reduce the number of cyclists who get hit by careless drivers each year?

Sorry, I used the hammer as an obvious example and one you could try at home? the point being that a helmet without a doubt will reduce blunt force injuries to your head, providing you don't miss the helmet of course. In that case, there really is no help for you anyway and Darwin will soon prevail.

One time I fell off my bike and landed on a pile of hammers. I sure was glad that I was wearing a helme(n)t.

Bullshitting aside, I don't think the hammer analogy is entirely inapt. I have crashed my bike and landed headfirst into a pile of rocks on a not very hard trail in a section that I had successfully traversed 100s of times - mountain biking can be dangerous when shit goes wrong. I had a nice big divot taken out of my helmet right over my right temple. It was a result of a sharp, localized impact, which is not unlike being hit bay a hammer. I really am glad I was wearing a helmet and I hate to think what could have happened if I hadn't been. The idea that foam hats are worthless is just stupid. I would never mountain bike without one.

A rabbi, a priest and a mullah are in an airplane with only 1 helment when the engines fails. The mullah says to the priest, "you take the helment, I don't need it and I will get 60 virgins. The priest says to the mullah, "you take it, I am going to heaven anyway". The rabbi says to both of them, "enough about the helment already"-The end

A guy could not get his dirt motorcycle started Saturday and threw his healmeant and broke the visor and scratched it up pretty bad. We got a good laugh at his dumb ass so without healmeants there would not have been that enjoyment however brief it was.

Jan Heine made a similar analysis a year or so ago. The crux of the biscuit:

“This analysis assumes that riders who wear helmets and those who don’t wear helmets otherwise behave identically. They don’t.

“Consider that 25% of cycling fatalities occur between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. Most people who are getting killed aren’t randonneurs on night-time rides. They are people who lost their driver’s license because of drunk driving. (31% of cycling fatalities have blood alcohol levels of 0.08 or higher.) These fatalities were on their way home from the bar. Most of them don’t wear helmets, but they also are riding a bicycle while intoxicated, without lights, usually on busy highways, just after the bars close. The lack of helmets is their smallest problem.”

The Fat Bee has a Rohloff(tm) hub, a Gates(tm) belt, a King(tm) headset, and Rock Shoxs(tm) suspension. All it needs is a Big Mac(tm) wrapped in Reynolds Wrap(tm) and Scotch(tm) tape, a pair of Nikes(tm), and a Frisbee(tm) in the Blackburn(tm) handlebar basket.

The CityBikes in the schoolyard... yes yes, far be it for adults to come in contct with children! In fact I forbid myself from seeing my own children, so that I won't molest them. On a related note, you know who spends a lot of time around children and frequently molests them? Teachers. See Comment II.

I know Bike Snob already addressed this, but i wear helmets all the time too. I wear them whenever it rains, because you never know when NYC will decide to cover a 2 block stretch with metal plates and I fear wet metal more than Madonna fears aging. I wear a helmet whenever I'm on my fast bike or whenever I'm on my (totes adorbs) cruiser with coaster brakes (because coaster brakes). I just don't think they're magic. I don't wear it on my big a$$ Worcycles bike in dry conditions because it is nearly impossible for someone with even the most basic handling skills to be knocked off of it at speeds where the helmet will be useful (< 15 mph). At the speeds needed for me to be knocked off of that tank, my brain will have bigger fish to fry, like my crushed body not sending it any oxygen. Morbid but true.

Several years ago three other customers and I were sitting in a butcher shop waiting for our orders. As this particular butcher is licensed to butcher deer and they were in season, the conversation took a turn as to the various ways people bag the deer they bring in — with rifles, bows and arrows, or perhaps even motor vehicles.

“I’m an insurance agent, and I can tell you that in this county there’s a 100 percent chance that you will hit a deer.” one of the customers said.

It may not be rated for faster, but that doesn't mean it is the same as nothing. You could very well strike a glancing blow that would make it a lower energy event, collide after incompletely braking, hit your head after absorbing some energy on other body parts, or be hit by something like a car going in the same direction which would have a lower relative velocity.

BTW hitting your brain against your skull is the reason for many serious brain injuries and compressible foam hats are supposedly meant to help here. They are not hard hats no matter how many times the hammer hitting analogists may pretend that is their function.

Then again protection against boo boos and other minor bumps and bruises is certainly what they are good at which seems to make many evangelical helmet wearers feel better about themselves.

I can't understand while any cyclist anywhere would ever want to see anti-cycling mandatory helmet laws introduced. Sure fat sanctimonious fucks who haven't ridden a bicycle in all their adult life seem to love the idea of mandatory helmet laws - but anyone who rides a fucking bicycle?

As many "real" Australian cyclists say - "You don't deserve to ride a bike unless you wear a helmet" - fucking dystopian nightmare that cycling in MHL land is.

II'm not about to research the statistics, but I'll bet that most drivers who suffered head trauma did not wear a helment. The thought of helment laws for drivers sounds absurd...because carrying helments would be such an inconvenience. But if studies were to show that drivers wearing helments are more likely to survive an accident, shouldn't driver helment laws be implemented? Of course not, because carrying helments would be such an inconvenience.

I'm going to cherry-pick the one factoid I liked best: that far more non-helmeted crashers suffered skull fractures than the helmeted. Then I'm going to extrapolate to the whole nation my own personal crash anecdotes: in a long but stodgy biking career I've probably crashed fewer than twenty times worth mentioning, and hit my head exactly once. But that one was very very bad - for the helmet, which sacrificed itself so that I might live and ride again. Again, my totally pointless bias.

This may be one of those things than needs a massive study over forty years and following 100,000 cyclists to make any headway that is rationally defensible. But the official myth of magical helmets will never die until King Arthur returns from Avalon riding a bike across the waves without a helmet.

I had a creepy spider disappear into my lid in LBL the other day and could not find it for the life of me. I strapped the helmet to my camel back and bombed the biggest downhill there. That spider freaked me out.

I'm a Broken record: After my bad fall (duffel bag in spokes>>>endo>>>land on head>>>wake up 90 minutes later in a cat scanner>>> subdural hematoma on the cat scan, I always wear a helmet (except for citibike)

I'll bet that most drivers who suffered head trauma did not wear a helment.

It's not actually a bad idea to a wear a helmet in a car - those like race or stunt drivers with a higher chance of crashing often do.

But your analysis overlooks that fact that cars are basically engineered to be full-body helmets, with crumple zones to absorb energy and airbags to cushion to residual impact.

So compared to a passenger in a box that's benefited from a couple of decades of lessons-learned engineering intended specifically to preserve the life of the occupants, comparatively speaking a bicyclist is naked flesh.

This school has NO PLAYGROUND... So they have all the kids, including "very little" ones, go out IN THE STREET to play... And they reckon it's the BIKE SHARE that's the problem...

It seems bad if you read just the headline, but if you read the whole thing you find out they close the street and have had permission to do so for years.

And while there's on-street car parking, I'd guess the turnover is quite low and probably gets coordinated with the recess monitors moving the kids. The spots directly in front of the school are reserved for department of education plates anyway.

Is it impossible to coordinate the recess usage and citibike? Probably not. But is that really the best choice location in the surrounding few blocks? Almost certainly not.

I really love that piece of opinionated science. Of course, all that drunken cycling at nighttime (no more salmoning, though) is all the same like commuting during daytime. And there are no confounders, and why is that? Because some other guy said so. But when you read that citation, it says that... "Helmet use was protective for head or brain injury in non-drinking cyclists, but had a confounding effect in drinking riders."What do you with that? Wearing a helmet on your sober commute, but refrain from it during stupor brawl?And a collision with a pedestrian or other cyclist is more likely to cause brain injury than a collision with a car? I doubt these people have ever been on a bicycle...

Of course helmet laws are useful!Here in the Chicago area, we follow the dictum of the great Rahm Emanuel (the Mayor), who famously said "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."So when Oak Park passes a helmet law for kids, it's not about safety. It's so they have a reason to stop non-helmeted minority kids riding bikes and ask the kid "Is that your bike? Let's go talk to your mom." Because all black kids steal bikes, right? Problem solved! And of course, non-helmeted white kids riding around town with mom and/or dad are not stopped. Because what would be the point?

skelter weeks you just have to look to Australia to see your plan in action. When helmet land introduced helmet laws in 1990 the Northern Territory police took great delight in fining Aboriginal children for not wearing a helmet. Worked a treat - kids were arrested and taken off to court for non payment of the fines - a real police state tactic that targeted the most vulnerable for the heinous crime of not wearing a bicycle helmet. (NT is now the only state in helmet land where the law was relaxed and isn't actively enforced after the bleeding heart liberals thought that jailing aboriginal kids for not wearing bicycle helmets wasn't exactly a great plan).

And a collision with a pedestrian or other cyclist is more likely to cause brain injury than a collision with a car? I doubt these people have ever been on a bicycle...

Not quite. Patients who made it to the hospital with a brain injury where apparently more likely to have collided with a bike or pedestrian; those declared dead at the scene (which probably includes a number of really bad head injuries) weren't included.

A lot of bike-car collisions occur at intersections where velocity may not be all that high. It may be that when cyclists collide with each other or with pedestrians those collisions happen because they are riding relatively fast.

I think it's also possible that getting tangled up with another bike may make you more likely that you go over and hit your head on the ground, vs sliding or roll type outcomes that might happen with a relatively smooth vehicle.

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About Me

While I love cycling and embrace it in all its forms, I'm also extremely critical. So I present to you my venting for your amusement and betterment. No offense meant to the critiqued. Always keep riding!